Ontonagon

Ontonagon's fame begins with a rock — the Ontonagon Boulder, a 3,700-pound mass of nearly pure copper that lay on the west bank of the river and was known to the Ojibwe for generations before any European saw it. Jesuit missionaries heard rumors of it in the 1600s; fur trader Alexander Henry reached it in 1766 and hacked off a hundred-pound souvenir. Lewis Cass's 1820 expedition broke their chisels on it. Schoolcraft drew it bigger than a six-man canoe — an exaggeration, but the legend had already outgrown the boulder.

Fame doomed it. In 1843, Detroit hardware merchant Julius Eldred hauled the boulder out of the riverbed — a saga of sledges, capstans, and paying off the War Department twice — and after lawsuits over who owned it, the federal government took it to Washington. It has sat in the Smithsonian ever since, and the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community's repatriation claim was denied in 2000. The town kept the name and lost the rock.

What the boulder advertised, the district delivered: Ontonagon County became a copper producer, with mines like the Minesota — note the spelling — and the boomtown swelled and shrank with the ore. The file keeps Ontonagon: the sacred boulder carted to the Smithsonian, the copper rush it announced, and the river town still named for a rock that isn't there anymore.

Ontonagon is the archive's copper file — the famous boulder, the denied repatriation, and the town the rock left behind.